[Overall of Module-Based Engineering]
In an industrial plant, a module-based engineering is useful for automation design by configuring and maintaining overall plant control systems, including plant instrumentation, safety instrumentation, and maintenance management. In general, servers of automation engineering systems centrally manage database of engineering data, which makes design information available for expanding, modifying, or maintaining the plant control system, and saves unnecessary manpower for fixing inconsistency between the design information and actual information stored in the plant control system. The module-based engineering refers to an engineering method to design control applications and alarms by transforming control logic and design information into modules and then combining the modules in the server of the automation engineering system. The modules, which may generally consist of independent software components such as customer information and know-hows gathered from the past design pattern experiences, may also include control logics, alarm attributes, and design information. Reuse of the modules configured in previous projects can improve engineering quality and reduce engineering time, which contributes to shorten the project period. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a general concept of module-based engineering for automation design. As shown in FIG. 1, modules can be configured, registered to, and downloaded from the server of the automation engineering system by an engineering tool of the automation engineering system. The engineering design information is saved to create a summary document of the engineering results. In addition, the module-based engineering can be concurrently performed with the following engineering tasks: I/O design, control application design, and system configuration design.
In the module-based engineering, control logic, alarm attribute, design information, and attachments are treated as a module. The modules may generally include: design information; control logic; tuning parameters; alarm attributes; and attachments. Design information, such as functional specifications, may be defined as a module component. The design information may generally include texts, images, and tables that explain the details of the module. Control logic may include a control drawing and detailed definitions of functional blocks, switches, and messages. The control logic may be defined in a class module or an application module. Module-based engineering may allow tuning parameters to be treated as module components by bulk editing of tuning parameter design values in functional blocks defined in control logic of a field control system, and by comparing and setting tuning parameter design values and current values of a field control system. The field control system may be a hardware I/O Controller. Alarm attributes may be alarm setting values and alarm priorities. An arbitrary file can be attached as a module component. The list of attachments can be launched by a simple operation.
There are two types of modules available for module-based engineering, for example, a class module and an application module. The class module is used as a template for a control application, and the application module acts as an actual control application. The class module is a template. Based on the class module, an application module to perform an actual control application can be created. The application module maintains the relationship with the class module which is used as a template, and changes made to the class module are reflected to the application module. A single module is used as a template for multiple application modules. The application module performs a control application by assigning I/O and tag name to the application module. There are two types of application modules available, for example, a class-based application module created based on a class module, and a class-less application module created without using a class module.
The module-based engineering may allow designing of I/O, control applications, and system configuration in parallel, which enables to start designing control applications and I/O before finalizing the system configurations. Even after designing control applications, the I/O designs may be changed flexibly. Plant information contains various kinds of information for implementing control systems engineering. In the module-based engineering, I/O may be designed based on obtained I/O information of a plant. In general, engineering tools of the automation engineering system may be used for designing I/O to configure plant I/O information into a table-format I/O information list. The I/O information list defines information such as I/O tag names, I/O module types, and FCS station names where I/O modules are mounted, as well as the specific information of each I/O. The I/O information list can be exported and/or imported. The setting information of the I/O information list may be edited on an exported external file, and the setting information may be imported to the engineering tool of the automation engineering system. A class module is firstly created as needed. Then an application module is created using or not using the class module. The engineering tool of the automation engineering system is used for engineering of the control application design. An I/O tag name is given to an I/O terminal of the application module. An actual tag name is applied for the functional block of the application module. Since a control application is created based on the I/O tag name, the control application can be created prior to completion of the I/O design such as I/O module assignment information or specific information of each I/O.
Engineering of items other than designing I/O and control applications are done by designing system configuration such as field control stations (FCS) and human interface stations (HIS) as well as items common for the project and relevant to stations. These items are configured by a system view. The engineering tool of the automation engineering system is used for setting switches such as common switch, global switch, annunciator, signal event, operator guide messages, and printing messages. The engineering data of the I/O design and control application design created in the engineering tool of the automation engineering system independently of the system configuration are eventually assigned to a field control station (FCS) and generated as any project data. The engineering for process I/O, serial communication Ethernet communication completes when a project data is completed.
When module-based engineering is finished by completing the project data, the control applications test is conducted by using a predefined set of test functions. Functions to support module-based engineering include document generation function, bulk editing function, tuning parameter management function. The document generation function is to integrate design information of a module and various engineering data to generate a single document file. The tuning parameter management function is to manage the functional block tuning parameter values designed when creating control applications and current tuning parameter values of the field control systems. The bulk editing function is to collectively edit control logics and alarm attributes of the modules designed while configuring control applications.